Welcome home, Randy.

Be happy.

“Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

—Nietzsche

And Now, a bonus story:

Gary A. Braunbeck’s International Horror Guild Award-Winning Novella

Kiss of the Mudman

“Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.”

—Igor Stravinsky

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

1

Of all the things I have lost in this life, it is music that I miss the most.

I read once that humankind was never supposed to have had music, that it was stolen by the Fallen Angels from something called The Book of Forbidden Knowledge and given to us before God could do anything about it. This article (I think it was in an old issue of Fate I found lying around the Open Shelter) said this book contained all information about Science, Writing, Music, Poetry and Storytelling, Art, everything like that, and that humanity wasn’t supposed to possess this knowledge because we wouldn’t know what to do with it, that we’d take these things that were supposed to be holy and ruin them.

I remember thinking, How could God believe we’d ruin music? I mean, c’mon: say you’re having a rotten day, right? It seems like everything in your life is coming apart at the seams and you feel as if you’re going under for the third time...then you hear a favorite song coming from the radio of a passing car, and maybe it’s been twenty years since you even thought about this song, but hearing just those few seconds of it brings the whole thing back, verse, chorus, instrumental passages...and for a frozen instant you’re Back There when you heard it for the first time, and Back There you’re thinking: I am going to remember this song and this moment for the rest of my life because the day will come that I’m going to need this memory, and so you-Back There taps you-Right Here on the shoulder and says, “I can name that tune in four notes, how about you?”

You can not only name it in three, but can replay it in your mind from beginning to end, not missing a single chord change, and—voila!—your rotten day is instantly sweetened because of that tune. How could any self-respecting Divine Being say that we might ruin music when a simple song has that kind of power? I’ll bet many a sad soul has been cheered by listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s “Old Dan’s Records,” or broken hearts soothed by some goofy songs like Reunion’s “Life Is A Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)”; how many people in the grips of loneliness or depression have been pulled back from the edge of suicide by a song like “Drift Away,” “I’m Your Captain,” “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” or even something as lame as “Billy Don’t Be A Hero”? You can’t really say for certain, but you can’t discount the thought, either, because you know that music has that kind of power. It’s worked on me, on you, on everyone.